Hello, Does anyone know of a software company that will built charts based on your own index. For example, let's say I want to trade a basket of stock on a particular sector, but not all of them, only 5. I want to be able to program a chart including these 5 stocks to follow intraday. Thanks, shneed
You can make a composite of many symbols and plot it on a chart using Metastock either EOD or RT. Bob
Custom index charting can be a difficult thing to do correctly. It's easy to do for simple streaming quotes but a lot harder if you're looking at historical price bars. For example, if you want to create your own index of MSFT, INTC, and IBM and for simplicity let's say you weight them equally. You can compute the current "index" quote as just (MSFT+INTC+IBM)/3 - that's easy. You might even be able to synthesize price bars going forward based on the T&S of the stocks in your index and their relative weightings. But if you're trying to look at say a 5 minute chart of your index, how do you synthesize complete OHLC price bars from the price bars of the components? Was the high of a bar on IBM at the same time as MSFT and INTC? To properly synthesize the full OHLC historical bars, you'd have to reach back through all the historical T&S for all the stocks and build the bars in order to get your index's high and low correct. However, if you can live with a simple line chart of time bar closing prices, you can compute the weighted result of all the component stock's respective closing prices. I think you might be able to do that with qcharts by entering a symbol formula like (MSFT+INTC+IBM)/3